Expendable
by Lady Caris
Summary: It is astonishing how often John is undervalued by Sherlock throughout the series; rather than being able to brush off every traumatic event, John more realistically finds himself struggling to cope with the rather poor treatment. Part !: "Hounds of Baskerville"- Sherlock should have known that a dangerous drug and a PTSD-diagnosed army doctor does not mix.


_My name is John H. Watson. The date is January 8th. It is 3:04 in the morning._

He breathes in, tighter and tighter until it feels like the skin on his chest will burst.

_I am in my bedroom at 221b Baker Street._

A heartbeat of tension; he can feel his fingers twitching uncontrollably. The gathered air punches from his lungs in one great, uncontrolled whoosh; he's lost control of the breathing exercise again. A thick emotion churns in his throat. He feels he might choke on it.

_I am not in Afghanistan. I am not in the lab. There is no monstrous hound stalking me. _

His head dangles momentarily, as though pressed upon by a physical manifestation of the paranoia, the anxiety, the shakes and nerves and fear and sleeplessness. His body does not feel like his own. He is a paper doll, and only a thin membrane distinguishes his self from the radiating darkness of the late hours of the night.

There is a round clock hanging rather precariously on a rusty nail in John's bedroom, near the ceiling. It is swathed in shadow and John's dilated eyes can barely find its form in the gloom. But he can hear it, oh he can hear it.

Soft, persistent _tic tic tic tic_ and John hears bombs exploding and landmines roaring, and he tastes sand and burning heat in his mouth, smells the sharp tang of blood and feels the aching bite of a bullet all over again.

He bites on his knuckles, a mindless response to an urge in the back of his mind that commands him to center himself, sort out where, geographically and temporally, he is again. The prick of pain from the indented skin is slow to register in his mind, and even then it does so on an entirely separate level, like one person submerged in a pool while the other lounges by its curb. John is in Afghanistan, sewing up a man's leg wound (no anesthetic) in the frontlines, and he is also flying back because _oh God he's been hit by a bullet he's been shot_, and in another realm he is perched on the edge of his bed at 3:04 in the morning, January 8th, stuffing his knuckles into his mouth to stifle the gasps.

_My name is John H. Watson. The date is January 8th. It is 3:04 in the morning._

* * *

"You look unwell," Sherlock states.

John twists his head at the drawl, acknowledging Sherlock's statement with a raised brow, as though to say, _Hmm? What was that?_

"I do?" he repeats, a bit tonelessly, a bit mindlessly, as he neatly slits the envelope and pulls out the enclosed documents within. Flimsy white computer paper falls into his palms; creased once, obviously decorated in a child's messy crayon scrabbles. A thank-you note. Signed, Billy.

Billy, the ten year-old who Sherlock had "completed a case" for just last week. Sherlock had been bored, John had been watching crap telly, and when the boy timidly raised the knocker on their door Sherlock had already leapt up, bathrobe and all, and thrown open the door, let the child get scarcely more than three words in, then solved his problem and closed the door again in his face.

"You skin–it has the consistency and a waxy pallor about it," Sherlock points out, his eyelids barely flicking open before shutting again.

John tucks the letter into his pocket. It will go into the attache he keeps under his bed, the house for all sorts of small memorabilia and trinkets he has collected throughout their little adventures. Opening the case late at night, when he finds himself waking in a cold sweat and with his mind jumpy and disconnected, helps him to anchor himself in the present. Sometimes he sits for hours running the items through his hand–the pink phone, the cabby's pill bottle, a shred of material from the bomb jacket that Moriarty had forced John to wear…

John does not bother to form an inquiry to Sherlock's casual statement. Partially because he can't find it within himself to care that he appears ill, partly because he does not want to possibly get onto the subject of _why _he looks ill, and, a needle-hurt voice whispers to him, partly because Sherlock would not care to listen if John had anything of import to say in response.

His eyes, against their will, slide to the right after a minute of silence, where Sherlock is stretched upon the couch, hands clasped beneath his chin and closed, uncaring eyes. He could be mistaken for a statue carved from icy marble if not for the incessant, silent mutterings rolling past his lips. "Mind Palace", then.

Sherlock might have never presented his observance in the first place, for all the uninterested effort he put into pursuing the topic.

_("I don't have __**friends**__," Sherlock spits.)_

_You have friends, _John thinks, and the thought is soft with wistfulness and frayed by a deep, pummeling sense of hurt, like a rock grinding against cloth until holes begin to form.

_I think it's __**me **__who is alone._

* * *

John is reading the newspaper when Sherlock drops his (John's, of course) laptop onto the cluttered table and slides it over to him. He sends Sherlock a quick look, shakes his head in disbelief, and goes back to his paper.

"John."

"John."

"_John_."

The man sighs and rubs a hand over his face briefly. "Yes, Sherlock?"

"You haven't written any blog posts recently."

"I know."

"It's been two months since your last post–the, oh what insipid name did you curse it with, "The Hound of the Baskervilles"–and you have not written a new one since."

"Your point?"

"We have had several cases of qualifying excitement in the time period since then." Sherlock nudges the laptop a bit closer, and his expression is inscrutable. John tries to muster up the energy to read into it, to actively think and analyze, but he is too tired. He cannot concentrate.

"I know," John says. He is faintly surprised Sherlock used the word "we" instead of "I". As brilliant as the man is, it seems that even he can be susceptible to the occasional wording error.

A moment of blessed, hated silence, and then–

"Write one." The laptop is finally pushed straight onto John's folded legs.

A quick flurry of emotion surges maliciously under the stiff upper lip and tense arms. His shoulder is throbbing in pain, and answering twinges resound from his leg, the one that had formerly decided it was useless and gave out on him. He is suddenly so irrationally angry and irritated and-

"_Leave_ it, Sherlock!" John hisses, practically throwing his laptop across the table as though it was a live coal and he'd been burned. Sherlock rotates to fix his piercing eyes on the poor computer, blinking in confusion.

An acute sense of shame and unwanted embarrassment tends to the flames licking at John's chest and shoulder and legs. Why did he do that?

He grunts, hackles deflating, smooths the area where the newspaper was crinkled in his grip, and pretends to go back to reading. Sherlock moves away after a second, ponderously slow, before he spills himself into his armchair and wordlessly begins to think.

* * *

It is a rare occasion where they are both sitting down in the kitchenette, digging into some greasy takeout that John can't quite remember the name of. A sense of satisfied contentment curls heavily in the warm kitchen; John feels it deep and low in his belly, the burning sense of purpose that Sherlock had unknowingly saved him with that first time they met.

John slept well last night for the first time in months. His appetite rumbles in his stomach, and he finds just enough willpower to force himself to eat a few more morsels, because right now he actually feels hunger and actually feels the need to _do_ something about it.

"It was ridiculously mundane, in retrospect," Sherlock says, pointing with a chip as though it was a stick and he was a professor delivering a lecture. "I mean, really. Who decides to murder someone through sabotage, using something as sure to be noticed at a later date as a carbon monoxide leak, and then forgets to clear up their own implicating evidence? I tell you, John, if I chose a career as a consulting criminal, you know I'd have a little bottle of bleach with me for my crime scene, and I'd pour it all over the floor just to nettle at the forensics team and ruin all the possible DNA samples left behind."

"It's a good think you're not a criminal, then, and that ours didn't think to have bleach with him," John says mildly, reaching for his cup of coffee and frowning when his hand closes upon nothing. He gets up, looking around the kitchenette and wondering if he set his cup down somewhere earlier without realizing it.

"Here," Sherlock says, and John turns around to see him sliding the mug across the table.

His lips move to say _thanks _but suddenly he sees, in vivid detail, Sherlock handing him a mug contritely, watching him closely as John drinks it, faithful and loyal to the point of stupidity because why would he ever suspect Sherlock of tampering with his drink?

and then

and then John is curled up in a cage, shaking, falling apart and withering at the seams because he can hear heavy padding feet circling him, glimpse two round, crazed red eyes through the gap in the tarp, and yet he is also back in Afghanistan getting shot at and mines are going off –

–"John?"–

–His face blanches. He takes the coffee and dumps it in the sink, throws out his trash, and ascends the staircase without another word, deaf to Sherlock's puzzled calls.

* * *

He–he put John in a room, in a closed environment being pumped full of hallucinogenic _gas _designed to incite irrational fear, paranoia, and delusions.

He tailored the lie, like a little kid designing a project for a science fair. And John was a nice little polished pawn, wasn't he, to be maneuvered so heartlessly across the checkered board?

John, with his PTSD and his memories of getting shot and blown up and hunted, of days on end forgoing sleep either because the enemy was too close to their position for him to rest comfortably or because there were so many wounded to treat.

And then he comforted him when John was sure he was going to be mauled, when he was sure the next bullet was going to finish what the first just barely couldn't, and he told John everything was okay

but

it wasn't!

And after that insufficient respite Sherlock was already up and spouting, the listless ploy of comfort vanished like smoke, because John you're a soldier you should be able to weather this, and God forbid that John should be sick and confused and then later enraged and beyond hurt that Sherlock had violated him in such a deep, macabre way. Sherlock should have known. He should have _known_.

The man could deduce the cause for two murders in almost a heartbeat but could not see that poisoning an ex-army doctor with a hallucinogenic drug was a rather terrible idea.

* * *

What if he did know?

John hates that thought the most, when he finds himself sitting up at night with the light on because he's a grown man damn it but he can't stand the darkness, and his hands are trembling little fists under the covers, then atop the covers, then under them, because he feels trapped when they are buried under the blankets but he feels cold when he brings them out.

What if Sherlock knew what would happen? Knew that it was a bad idea?

And did it anyway?

* * *

Perhaps, aside from the more obvious reasons, it stings and cuts so deeply because John lets himself pretend, for a moment, that their situations are reversed; that Sherlock is the one wandering the somber labs, and that John is the one watching through the security feed.

And he knows without a beat of hesitation that he would not have exposed Sherlock to that gas. Not even for the case, not even for Henry's soul. He would have warned him, would have drawn him back to his side and then they could have logically performed more clinical tests to see if it was in the fog.

And John knows, he _knows _that it's not too fair of him to expect Sherlock to understand and obey social niceties, like not drugging your friend _("don't have friends!") _and he gets that, really, he does. But that didn't make the drug feel any less real, and it doesn't stop the burst of nightmares and panic attacks and uncontrollable mood swings and numbness that thereafter follow that day.

Perhaps it wouldn't sting and cut so deeply if John felt Sherlock really meant his lackluster apology. If Sherlock had not known, in at least cold logic, that what he had done was "a bit not good" and had expressed genuine remorse.

* * *

One day John gets his coat to go to the store and pick up some groceries.

Or rather, John gets up to get his coat and falls to the ground because his leg refuses to support his weight, even though there is nothing physically wrong with it.

* * *

One week after his limp returns, John caves in and paws through his nightstand, where he finds the business card with his therapist's name inscribed on it in professional lettering. He calls the number and schedules a new string of appointments.

* * *

When Sherlock found him the first time, John was so alone, and so adrift. He walked with a cane and a limp and phantom pains in his shoulder and with a back bowed as if the weight of the world had come to rest on his shoulders.

And then Sherlock saved him. He removed the need for the cane, restored John's thirst for life and passion and gave him a home, a purpose, a reason for waking up in the morning and putting on his clothes and shoes.

He made John feel important again.

Not in the arrogant sense that John's intelligence was needed or vital, but in that he knew he was the only one Sherlock had laughed with, had opened up even the slightest degree to. That finally Sherlock had someone to bounce ideas off of, a willing ear to listen to his tirades and harangues without leaving in disgust.

A "Bloody Brilliant" to his "It's Elementary, John!"

And then Sherlock drugged him and left him without really apologizing or checking to see if he was actually okay, and John realizes that what he feels is–

–expendable.


End file.
